On latest podcast, we discuss the seven-year-old’s birthday and our recent Thanksgiving, and then recap our field trip to see Rhett and Link on the Tour of Mythicality that included an impromptu Beastie Boys flashback.

In case you’re wondering — and you almost certainly have to be — here’s the deal in the photo above: The 11-year-old was in the middle of one his now-frequent mood swings while the seven-year-old wanted to fix himself up to look like Link in the picture they’re both holding.

(We play a brief clip from Rhett and Link’s podcast, Ear Biscuits, and if you want to hear that episode in its entirety, knock yourself out.)

I wrote about it on Facebook a few weeks but I’ll recount the story here too…

We drove seven hours through a driving rain storm to catch the next-to-last show ever in the Tour of Mythicality and it was worth every harrowing near-death experience. The seven-year-old was wide-eyed with excitement from start to finish, literally sitting on the edge of his seat, clapping furiously after every song and sketch, laughing uproariously -- even if he didn't totally get the joke -- and raising his hand with all the urgency of the know-it-all in class when Rhett and Link called on volunteers. The 11-year-old was much more understated in his appreciation of the show but I could hear him cackling, and every time I glanced over a huge smile was plastered across his face.

And this was all DURING the show. Afterwards, we got to meet Rhett and Link.

(We all grew up in the same small town back in the '80s; I'm four years older but they're the same age as my sister and they've all been friends since elementary school. But my kids only know Rhett and Link through the television. For them, it was like meeting Bruce Springsteen or Beyonce.)

By the time show ends, it's 11:30 pm and we hadn't eaten since lunch. Under any other circumstances, the seven-year-old is passed out from the combination of sleep deprivation and hunger. But he was as alert as if he'd just gotten 12 hours sleep after the best meal of his life. So we were about four people deep in a line of 100 and the seven-year-old saw Rhett and Link as they appeared from behind a wall and made their way to the meet-and-greet area.

HE WENT NUTS.

The closest thing I can liken it to is when Oprah used to surprise her studio audience with those 'AND YOU GET A CAR! AND YOU GET A CAR!' announcements. The reaction of those women?

Two minutes later, we're walking up to meet them. The seven-year-old leads the way, followed by 11-year-old, our 17-year-old nephew (who introduced us to Good Mythical Morning five years ago -- long before we knew about the show and long before he knew I grew up with them), and I'm bringing up the rear.

The seven-year-old was very nervous about what to say, but he walks up to Link, extends his hand and introduces himself.

You’ll have to listen to the podcast for all the details but I’ll leave you with these two nuggets:

One: The drive home — and the weeks that followed — was a constant barrage of, "I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW MUCH I LOVED THE 'TOUR OF MYTHICALITY'! AND WE GOT TO MEET RHETT AND LINK!"

Two: As a parent, there are few things better than seeing your kids truly and completely happy.

On this episode, the 11-year-old and I talk about the fact that his voice has changed dramatically since the last podcast -- seriously, he's gone from fresh-faced, squeaky-voiced elementary school kid to James Earl Jones as Darth Vadar. We go on to discuss what it's like to now be in middle school and some of the freedom's that come with getting older.

Like, say, us deciding to let him watch "Stranger Things." (So far, he loves it. I can't stress this enough.)

We also touch on what we did over the summer (camping, traveling up and down the eastern seaboard, seeing out first live show) and our early Christmas plans, which is another way of saying: We're going to see Rhett and Link next month on their Tour of Mythicality. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, we get into the details on the podcast. But if you have kids, you're almost certainly nodding your head knowingly right now.

Experience has taught us that the 11-year-old can sometimes be very grumpy. Usually it's because he's hungry, but during long breaks from school -- like holidays or, say, spring break -- boredom can quickly morph into irrational anger if there is no contingency plan. Which is why this spring break was one long exercises in keeping busy.

It wasn't like we did anything exciting, we were just busy. And sometimes that's good enough. If nothing else, it gave us something to talk about on the latest podcast. We also discussed the breaking news out of Uranus, the 11-year-old's new-found love for his new old-school New Balance, the lost art of kids knowing how to talk on a telephone, and the man who calls himself LeBron James.

The 11-year-old will wear anything. In that sense, he's like a lot of 11-year-olds. It also serves as a reminder that for as much as our kids are like us, they're also incredibly different.

For example, I LOVED sports growing up. When I was seven, I remember using chalk to sketch out hashmarks in our cul-de-sac for a makeshift asphalt football field. When I was eight I spent what felt like the entire summer playing pick-up baseball with the other kids in the neighborhood.

(Two things: 1) Parents go to jail nowadays for letting their kids wander around unsupervised for eight hours at a time; 2) Is pick-up baseball even a thing anymore? It sounds like something straight out of 'The Natural' though it felt like a perfectly normal way for a kid to spend a summer day as recently as the '80s.)

By the time I was nine, I was on my first Little League roster, and I played baseball, basketball and soccer for the next decade.

The 11-year-old doesn't like sports. In fact, it's fair to say that he loathed his rec soccer experience to the point that we both decided that, in the interest of everyone's health, it was best if he retired at age eight. But here's the thing: he's a fantastic rock climber, something that wasn't even a thing when I was growing up in North Carolina in the '80s. Mostly because I grew up in North Carolina in the '80s. But he's been doing it for a couple years and he's awesome.

It's an amazing feeling to watch your kids succeed, especially when it's something you can't do. But again, it's those differences -- despite all the similarities -- that make them weird and funny and interesting.

Another example: The six-year-old LOVES looking nice. He's even been known to don a tie for special occasions.

Yes, he's wearing two dress shirts; the dark striped one is serving as his sport coat because he doesn't own one ... yet.

The six-year-old is also an early riser -- well before me -- and when I make my way downstairs on school days, he's always fully dressed and sometimes he's already made his breakfast. Meanwhile, I still have to wake up the 11-year-old, and I still have to lay out his clothes. Unlike his brother, he's not a morning person. In fact, I'm convinced I could lay out a burlap sack and he'd slip it on, still half-asleep, wander downstairs for a quick bite to eat, and forget for the millionth straight day to brush his hair or his teeth before we headed to the bus stop where the neighbors would have further confirmation that I was raising a cave man.

I'm like the six-year-old in that I like looking presentable. The idea of wearing sweatpants somewhere other than the gym (and the bus stop; at this point, that's basically an extension of my living room) seems insane to me. But not the 11-year-old. In fact, the other day, we got into a shouting match about just that. I was going to take the kids to the coffee shop, and I asked the 11-year-old to swap out his Adidas sweats, lovingly covered in the dog hair of our nine-year-old yellow Lab, for jeans.

Instead of the 20 seconds it takes to change your pants, we wasted 30 minutes yelling about why wearing sweatpants bedazzled in dog hair in public reflected poorly on him, me and the dog. We went back and forth, me making empty threats, him having none of it, until he eventually relented. He did put on those jeans. And he also got the last laugh because the bottom of said jeans were inadvertently tucked into his socks.

This drives me nuts.

He does it 2-3 times a week, never on purpose, and he's perpetually put out when I bring it up.

"Why does it matter?" he'll ask incredulously

"Why does it matter?" I'll respond, doubling down on the incredulity. "BECAUSE TUCKING YOUR JEANS INTO YOUR SOCKS ISN'T A THING UNLESS YOU'RE RIDING YOUR BIKE TO WORK AND EVEN THEN IT'S QUESTIONABLE."

You'll be surprised to learn that, like the sweatpants and jeans tucked into his socks, the 11-year-old doesn't much care for what he wears on his feet. He'll gladly slip on his worn-down sneakers, the brownish-gray pair that didn't start out that way but now serve as a metaphor of his dirt-and-mud-filled existence. Put another way: He's due some new kicks, though that would never occur to him.

So I took it upon myself to order him some old-school New Balance, the ones that were originally popular when I was growing up and, thanks to the hipsters, have made a comeback. The 11-year-old knew none of this and, other than a pair of Chuck Taylors when he was five, he's only worn Keens.

I didn't ask him before I placed the order because his default response to something new is to reject it outright. Instead, I casually mentioned the shoes had arrived and left the box on the kitchen table while he finished dinner. A few minutes later, he laced them up, took them around the house for a quick test drive, and announced that he really like them.

I was shocked.

For someone who cares so little about clothes, this felt like a breakthrough.

He wore them for the rest of the night, thanked me at least three times for getting them, and when he woke up the next morning the first thing he did was was put on his New Balance.

He even wore them to the coffee shop -- along with his sweatpants. And I was cool with that. Hey, you can't have everything.

Five years ago, our oldest began kindergarten. His little brother was a few days shy of his first birthday, and our mornings consisted of bus-stop drop-offs and figuring out how to co-exist; I worked while he played, ate and pooped. It wasn't exactly a symbiotic relationship -- or at least it didn't feel like it at the time.

Now that the little one is in kindergarten -- we loaded him onto the bus an hour ago -- and it's just me and the dog, the mornings are weird. Weirdly quiet, weirdly ... boring. I can probably get used to boring -- it's my default setting, but it'll take some adjusting.

In the meantime, the podcast is back, after a brief 10-month hiatus! And to commemorate the soon-to-be six-year-old's public-school debut, he makes a guest appearance.